Nice! Finding a view separate from the West may be difficult if you want English-language materials, unfortunately. But there are good English language historians skeptical of cold warrior narratives. I don't know why I didn't mention him originally, but you may find Domenico Losurdo very useful for this essay. His book(s) on Stalin will be super relevant as they juxtapose Western propaganda about him and the USSR during the period when Animal Farm was written versus firm historical realities.
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Oh yes, I completely agree with all of your criticisms. It just wasn't clear to me that the author was directly saying that e.g. universal suffrage was the path, I think they are actually a very unclear writer without an obvious thesis, so it is left up to implication by where they placed emphasis. I think to myself, why are they writing so much about universal suffrage!? Is it to push reformism? Is it esoteric Marx deification, as yoi mention? Are they just really keen on some future eventuality, intermediate process (revolution) ignored? Is this an underhanded criticism of existing and historical socialist projects that are not focused on what they refer go as universal suffrage?
Maybe I missed where they were more forthright, but my impression was that this was presented as a dive into what Marx himself thought about something (something Marx wrote very little about and really didn't care about) and the rest is just very unclear and may be forwarding some unstated point if we read the tea leaves and the author's biography or something.
For something approachable by liberals, which will be your teacher and classmates, newer works by R. W. Davies will work. He is an actual historian who focuses on primary sources. Reading him will rob the project of its political character, but in many ways that is probably to your benefit on this essay. Unfortunately I am basically recommending you 7 long books and that is probably not practical, but maybe you can skim them and focus on certain parts.
Personally, I was happy to annoy my teachers so I would probably contextualize the USSR as through a cold warrior's view, with Orwell being an anticommunist who betrayed the people around him for being gay, socialist, communist, etc. Animal Farm is not a historical work, it doesn't describe anything real at all, it literally a fiction intended to denigrate communists and the USSR without using one lick of factual material about it.
Animal Farm cannot be contextualized by just the USSR itself because it does not describe the USSR as a character or setting. It only reveals the mind of the author and how they envisioned their own politics as against those of the USSR, with his very limited understanding in both domains. His alignment against the USSR traces the development of the cold war itself, with him adopting others' terms for the (suddenly evil after being a valued ally in WWII), for example, "totalitarian" state. The fact that he tried to get people around him blacklisted through a government contact would never be totalitarian, of course.
Orwell was poorly educated politically and in terms of current events. His characters are a cartoonish fiction that reflects this. So if someone says, "oh that one pig is Stalin", they are much less correct than someone saying, "that pig is how Orwell wants you to think of Stalin". Because the two actually bear no relation to one another. So this is why the best context us actually anticommunist propaganda and it tropes rather than the USSR in reality.
I think it isn't necessarily reformist except that both authors are so focused on Marx's views on this topic in the first place. He really had little to say about it and what he mostly appreciated was proletarian rule in any form it was realized. The Paris Commune was just the first major form it took during his life.
For some reason it is a controversial statement that he should be shot.
I recommend doing the opposite. Read good texts and widely so that you can recognize the flaws in others' rationales and school them when they try to pretend thst the Lexicon of one capitalist weirdo is somehow respectable. Some of this is philosophy but I would say that history and media criticism are even more important. Many arguments about "human nature" or how things should be vs. how they are are clouded by false histories and being unable to recognize manipulative thought processes.
Reading, say, Mein Kampf to learn about "the enemy" is of little value. "The enemy" didn't become who they are because Hitler wrote a convincing book and you won't argue them out of a position because you call them out when they quote it incorrectly or something. To understand Nazis you have to place them in their historical and political context. Who funded them? What was their class composition? Who opposed them and how? What were they a reaction to? And in modern times, who do they now appeal to? Are the mainstream cultural elements that overlap witg Naziism? Not just Trumpers, but mainstream liberals and "apoliticals"?
I would recommend starting with authors like David Graeber, Michael Parenti, Mike Davis, Michael Zinn, or Malcolm Harris for easier political-historical reads. To dive deeper you can read the texts they reference. And FAIR.org and the Citations Needes podcast for media criticism.
He can have some positive influences while still being the same thing I described. For example, Bernie focusing on vulgar class analysis and making socialism a more acceptable word (despite bastardizing it) were both useful things and yet Bernie is a pro-genocide chauvinist that sheepdogs for Dems. If Hasan's pattern holds, his takes on China will be, "China somewhat bad but USA worse and targeting it with nonsense" while trying to humanize actual Chinese people. His pattern is based on a vaguely left-liberal-with-socialist-language anti-racist internationalism of having empathy for people that the imperialist state seeks consent to do violence to. It's a good and useful thing to have voices opposed to that. But under his pattern, what will be the call to action, implicit or explicit? It will be to try to "push left" some Democrat imperialists and keep the focus on dead end electoral reformism. The only positive outlet for that is the same as for Bernie: disillusionment that we can build on for recruiting.
It is possible that he might give up on the electoralist angle eventually, which would also be useful if his audience is large. But I don't see that as his current trajectory.
Hasan is a slightly-left-of-AOC streamer doing the "we can push them left" thing, where the "them" is imperialist social democrats/left liberals. The place at which his followers arrive is, "I will only reluctantly vote for Kamala Harris" and, "I wish I could vote for AOC 2028". He occasionally arrives aa socialist positions and language like a toddler finding a new toy. He learns the toy, plays with it for a while, talks about it on stream, and then discards it. He wants to be on the edge of mainstream. Can't let the toy get in the way of that.
This is only good and useful in the same fashion that Bernie could be thought of as useful: some will be inspired by the toy, the appeal of possibility and pointing to (mostly) correct culprits of oppression, and then their disappointment at nothing changing may help radicalize. But many, probably the vast majority, will be led back to the Democratic party and liberalism, as Hasan neither offers them an onramp himself nor points anyone to next steps. He just returns to stream about electoral politics, Trump, the next elections, etc. And his audience follows him there.
Hasan should be considered situationally useful. We should be there to pick up the disaffected, as he is not pointing them to us. And doing it through our organizations. If we are not, then he is not part of any pipeline to developing more socialists, but just creating more Bernie-adjascent electoralists that sit at home and will be susceptible to most propaganda.
You have framed the question correctly, which means you are already 80% of the way to knowing! How do we oppose capitalism? Well, together! Individuals can do very little against the dominant system, but in an organized group we can use tried and true means - of organized withholding of labor, of takinh direct action, of increasing the size of our ranks, of educating ourselves and each other, and, usually out of necessity, arming ourselves.
So the question then becomes: okay, duh, we need lots of people working together, but how do we do that, what are better ways of doing it than others, and how do I get involved? This is a very important question because historically there are examples of success, failure, and outright counter-productive movements that all had this same stated goal. This is every dedicated anticapitalist's biggest thing to fret about: which lessons from history apply to us and which do not? What is best in your locale may not be what is best in someone else's and there may be many pathways that are better or worse than the other. How do you choose which to avoid and which to embrace? Where do you, personally, fit into the equation?
The othet answers have the right gist: personal education and joining and contributing to an organization.
There is a substantial catalog of political theory, history, philosophy, media criticism, and practical organizing skills that are almosy entirely untaught in capitalist-dominated school systems. Reading a good chunk of that catalog is important for choosing the right actions personally as well as contributing to the decisions made by an organization. You don't have to read all of it before you begin work in an organization, but you should start reading ASAP. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds first, it is very short and digestible and provides a good framing by which to question the modern history of capitalists, socialists, and fascists. From there I would gravitate to Marx and media criticism, such as Heinrich's explainer (which I would eventually compare to works criticap of Heinrich) and FAIR.org or the podcast Citations Needed. Add some Engels as well. From there you can branch out in any direction you would like, but an understanding of the October Revolution, its precedents, the USSR, and a critical approach to its critics is helpful for understanding what the hell everyone is talking about in a given organization (and people are often saying incorrect things on these topics). There is a recent Liberation School series on the topic, effectively by PSL, that I recommend. Others to look into after this: Goldman, Gramsci, Mao, Che, Kalecki, Amin, Fanon, Freire, Bobby Seale, George Jackson, Michael Hudson. This will provide some of the "Greatest Hits", albeit Western Centric. Dedicating time to the history of every socialist revolution is valuable. It will take yeara to read all of this and this is normal.
The other step is to join and organization. This gives you the opportunity to learn practical skills for getting people involved, educating people, being educated by others, and taking action. Not all anticapitalist organizations are created equal and there is a tendency for infighting between them. Some are actually highly counterproductive, so this isn't just pointless infighting though a lot of it is pointless. So long as you avoid abusive organizations that burn you out (or worse), being in any org is better than trying to pick the best one to join on your first try. I will suggest avoiding these kinds of organizations: Trotskyist, non-profits, Maoists that are up in each others' business, liberal identity politics groups (socialist/Marxist identity-focused groups can be good though!), and any group that spends most of its time on things like electoral politics and letter writing campaigns, i.e. what capitalists want their opposition to waste their time on. The first 3 groups are the most likely to be abusive and burn you out. The last is basically not actually anticapitalist at all even if they claim to be. To find options for local organization I recommend using a combination of attending events that sound cool and wors of mouth recommendations. "Anti-imperialist" is a decent indicator that a group is fairly cool, though it is not a guarantee. Go to a few events and feel them out. Protests, teach-ins, hosted political movie watching events, rallies, etc. You want to focus on the groups organizing these things, not just attending them, and only rule them out if they meet the above ezclusionary criteria. If they can't be ruled out, ask them how you can get involved. Any good organization will be very excited to loop you in and get you attending meetinfs and reading sessions within a few weeks.
I think the baseline default was around 20% before, which makes 30% still an increase.
Essays should be done in class if they are graded. Not to add a time crunch, but the opposite: at-home assignments leads to unrealistic and often classist expectations of homework time and parental/tutor support. Yes, spending time writing alone is valuable for learning. So is homework. Neither should be scored for a student's grade. At-home essays suffer from the same rampant cheating that homework does, which does a disservice to everyone involved in terms of learning. It's important to distinguish evaluations from the act of learning itself, the two are not synonymous: if students' essays are to be graded, they should be done under proctorship and with time and venue alotted for fairness, subject to special cases. Many standardized tests have essay portions and for all the problems with standardized testing, it is appropriate that they don't let test takers go home and mull over it for as long as their economic and support sotiation allows.
Writing essays in class runs into a time crunch in most primary and secondary schools because each class is alotted an arbitrary hourish window once per day. But there are schools that do 2+ hour sessions and have off days, making this practical. A student can write a rough draft one day, turn it in, get feedback, and then polish and turn it in for a grade. And universities can always dedicate appropriate amounts of class time, they just don't want to pay TAs for anything that can be turned into homework time. Too busy doing financialized real estate schemes instead.
Re: LLMs, they can produce essays yep. This is an indictment of a course that grades take-home essays. The course was already inappropriately constructed. The LLM didn't cause the problem here, it just exacerbated the existing problem that manifests as standard cheating (paying/bullying for essays), generally accepted soft cheating (parents write the essay), generally accepted classist legs up (parents help but don't write it/tutors do the same), and the inequalities in free time that impacts students heavily enough already.
but what if the synthesis itself was in the training data?
Then it has a good chance of regurgitating it. But this is very close to reusing test questions, which is already bad practice and leads to cheating. It's true that an LLM will solve a problem that none of the students have seen if the teacher's strategy of synthesis is to Google for examples, though. That pary is unfortunate but an assessment shouldn't be done in the context where someone can use an LLM anyways. Either way it's not synthesis.
In HS and undergrad level courses, how often are the topics at hand really novel enough to rely on that not being the case?
The topics aren't novel at all. But that doesn't really have anything to do with rote memorization regurgitation vs. synthesis. Synthesis questions are often new and different, even just changing the words used for a biological process for a question will strip memorization and force a focus on concepts. Add a follow up question to relate it to something else that was learned and you get synthesis. This is actually a very easy kind of test to write if you practice it.
Or how often is the syllabus really flexible enough to allow teachers to reframe all assessments into synthesis questions?
Assessments should be done in-person. In-person assessments can include simple recall questions. At-home work that is simple recall questions can already be solved by just Googling things. And you're describing a problem in course design. It's not individual teachers' faults that schooling is broken.
Re: the rest, you seem to think that I am picking on teachers. Not sure why.
Yes, of course
100%. By solved I really mean graded with a high score. Also, rampant cheating on homework is also basically the same as using an LLM. I have seen a very large number of college students share homrqork answers. But I don't think homework should be scored for a grade anyways. Homework should be for learning and for the teacher to know how well the class is going. If students understand this, that homework is a participation grade, and that the evaluations like tests are what determine grades, then cheating, LLMs, and getting parents' doing all the homework will be solely detrimental to grades, i.e. will no longer have any incentive. A win-win for pedagogy.
I think it's probably pretty bad at both of those things when it comes to what should actually be evaluated, which is students' understanding of concepts, not just recall. If you ask for the complexity of some algorithm, an LLM will try to find some pattern that matches the kinds of answers it has already seen before. It might get the answer right because it has digested 100 examples like it before and matched the input to it. But if you ask students to actually explain their reasoning and walk through it step by step, and throw in a modification to the algorithm that impacts the answer, the LLM is likely to fail in some way.
Though really, what should be graded is evaluations like tests. Homework should be for learning and practice, not a grade.
If homework and other at home assignments are graded (not just scored for learning), the teacher is already following bad practice. As you suggest, homework is for practice and learning. So it doesn't need to be graded, just scored so that students know what to improve on. It is evakuations like tests that should be graded. Tests aren't foolable by "AI" so long as they arw done in person.
Also, as you mention, the better demonstration of learning is synthesis, to apply concepts in new situations (teaching is even better for demonstrating knowledge, but this is rarely evaluated). LLMs don't understand concepts, they are bad at any actual synthesis questions. They can merge vocabularies and patterns, ape narrative structures, etc, but are very bad at combining actual reasoning concepts. If a teacher's test grading (let's say it's online) is fooled by an LLM it is unlikely to be synthesis questions. More likely recall and patterns.
If your coursework can be solved by a plagiarism markov chain-ish machine that is more of an indictment of your course than the students.
Treating homework and quizzes as participation credit and only grading tests is fairly common in US universities. Probably a minority, but still common.
Nothing major politically happens because an individual does something. We have to get together with other people that think like us and build that organization until it can take substantiative action, possibly in coalition with other organizations.
As an individual, that looks like joining an org and improving it. Improving it is you gaining skills, teaching those skills, doing logistics and planning, facilitating actions, interfacing with other orgs, and recruiting. I'm lumping in knowledge with skills - reading and knowing theory and history is also a skill.
Doing this is work, particularly emotional labor. Most socialist organizations retain heavy doses of liberalism both officially and among members. Many people and meetings will be exhausting. But this is how you learn the most valuable skill: navigating conversations to organize other people, including those who just said the must absurd thing you've ever heard. Building our movement means socially building a big series of conveyor belts to loop people into action and development so that we have a growing core of dedicated revolutionaries as well as a larger mass of sympathizers who can take action when called upon.
There is no other mode by which we can be said to have done anything substantial politically. The rest of what we can do as individuals is basically charity and making those around us a little less reactionary. Those are good things, but highly limited, and not up to the task of taking on the number 1 sponsored genocidal apartheid settler colony of capitalist empire.
Ah, thank you. I'll still probably avoid but it's good to know what's changed.
Oh definitely, I'm aware of them as a fairly new DSA caucus that began with the Cosmonaut people. I've heard the full gamut of opinions from their members, I don't think they have much internal discipline or education.